Schools and Screens: A Watchful History by Victoria Cain

Abstract

Reviewed by: Schools and Screens: A Watchful History by Victoria Cain Richard Butsch (bio) Schools and Screens: A Watchful History By Victoria Cain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021. Pp. 280. This book chronicles the history of the debate about the introduction of film, television, and computers into American classrooms through four periods of the twentieth century. It documents four "areas of tension" concerning media in classrooms and curricula: teaching citizenship, contributing to race inequality, growing dependence on private money and privatization, and distrust of teachers. The book narrates detailed accounts of the twists and turns, the promotion of and reactions to these media as an educational tool, and the fates of efforts to mediatize the classroom. The narratives themselves tell of groups who promote media use in classrooms, find funding, mount successful demonstration projects, meet resistance at implementation, experience at least partial successes, but in the end fade away, all of this aided or retarded by the zeitgeist of the moment. In each period, the hopes and expectations were overblown; lavishly funded pilot programs with well-prepared and staffed initial tests were initially [End Page 234] promising but finally disappointing when introduced to real schools with limited budgets and teachers with less preparation, fewer support staff, and inadequate facilities for the new curriculum. The narratives are well written and heavily researched, based on an exhausting amount of primary sources, and exceedingly well-documented (there are 70 pages of endnotes for 190 pages of text). The narratives do a remarkable job of weaving these numerous sources into a coherent story of media history. For all these outstanding qualities, the book does not fulfill the promise of the introduction, "to look not just to the histories of machines and teaching, but to social and cultural history." The chapters are filled with details of events but only an occasional mention reflecting on the cultural context and political moment. Similarly, the social history remains mostly at the microlevel of people and practices. For example, the brief bios of major characters, followed by their parts in events, lean more toward a "great man" approach rather than a structural and cultural approach. I would have liked to see more explanation to transcend the details and integrate the narratives into the larger portrait of American society, its institutions, peoples, and cultures through these decades. It would have been nice, for example, for the author to have explained how the dominant culture or variant cultures of the time abetted or obstructed widespread introduction of media in schools and with what consequences. Also, there was a missed opportunity in the introductions and conclusions—to each chapter as well as to the whole book—to discuss larger implications of issues and outcomes rather than just summarize events. Nevertheless, reading the narratives, one can extract some patterns. Among these is a lesson seemingly never learned: the educational innovation that works in a lab or field test, with lavish time, money, and staff, frequently cannot stand up to the impediments of real classrooms and budgets when broadly implemented. One educational innovation that has proven to be robust is Head Start, but few others are. The lesson, of course, is not that these innovations are failures but that many of our public schools are not funded nearly well enough to provide quality education, media notwithstanding. The narratives demonstrate this in citing the differential results in rich versus poor school districts. A second lesson that can be drawn from the narratives is the mistake of assuming that media and its messages are fixed facts, as if there were only one way (that of the reformers) to use a medium and to interpret and react to the messages. The narratives repeatedly reveal the unrealistic expectations of the reformers and their surprise that teachers and students often go a different way than expected. A third example is how much success teeters on whether the reform coincides with the particular political and cultural moment or not. One wishes that the book had elaborated more on these important lessons for which it has provided ample evidence. [End Page 235] Last, typos and other irregularities occur throughout the text and the notes, which I suspect are less the fault...